"Often do" is not the same as "generally".

Who said "generally"? I said, "If the state does some business exclusively with some 'private corporation' and if this corporation does no other business, this corporation is indistinguishable from a state agency."

Most state agencies I've been involved with definitely had monopolies on the services they provided.

Which is precisely why your business with them is part and parcel of their monopoly.

Private corporations which compete for government contracts will almost always have more competitors than do state agencies – which generally have none.

Your competition for these contracts is inconsequential. It's not true that a state agency has no competitors. States may have multiple agencies performing similar tasks and often do. You could just as easily work for some state agency competing for statutory appropriations, as I did.

Your dealings with the state are "private sector" in name only. These dealings are corporatist (fascist), while a state agency performing the same tasks is essentially socialist. You're a fascist. I was a socialist. I don't prefer one over the other. It's a distinction without a difference.

It's not incorporation that makes an organization corporatist. It's the commercial dealings with the state. Your customer is the state and by extension the taxpayer, but the taxpayer doesn't choose to do business with you, unless these biannual plebicites are supposed to be the "choice". I categorically reject this nomenclature.

Sorry, but I do not believe that state agencies have near the survival risk as do government contractors.

Any number of government contractors have been around for the better part of a century. States may prefer state employees in nominal state agencies to these quasi-state-agency contractors, and I don't know why they shouldn't really. Blackwater for example is a frighteningly fascistic organization.

Furthermore, I do not believe that a contractor always "survives for the duration of its contracts".

Of course, it does, unless the contract is voided for some reason, in which case it isn't a contract anymore. State agencies can also be dissolved at any time, theoretically. There's not a dime's worth of difference between a state "contracting out" and simply assigning the task to some state agency. Maybe there's a penny's worth.

The problem usually is that the state is doing the business at all. Contracting out doesn't solve this problem.

"Often do" is not the same as "generally". Most state agencies I've been involved with definitely had monopolies on the services they provided. Private corporations which compete for government contracts will almost always have more competitors than do state agencies – which generally have none.

Martin Brock: "A contractor survives for the duration of its contracts just as any other state agency survives for the duration of its appropriations."

Sorry, but I do not believe that state agencies have near the survival risk as do government contractors. Furthermore, I do not believe that a contractor always "survives for the duration of its contracts". Most probably do, but the risk of failure is always present.

the corporation has a permanent monopoly on that business with the state …

States may have redundant agencies and often do, so this monopoly is not necessary for a private corporation to be like a state agency.

the state guarantees the corporation will survive regardless of its efficiency

A contractor survives for the duration of its contracts just as any other state agency survives for the duration of its appropriations.

Government contracts I've bid on, on behalf of my employers, were extremely competitive.

That's a good thing, I suppose, but government agencies nominally compete for appropriations as well, so this competition doesn't much distinguish a contractor from a government agency.

Have you prepared a bid for a government contract, Martin? Would you mind sharing that experience with us?

I've worked for a Federal agency and witnessed the competition for appropriations. Soviet agencies also competed for state funding, so I'm not sure what point you're making here.

I suppose if:

1. the corporation has a permanent monopoly on that business with the state; and

2. the state guarantees the corporation will survive regardless of its efficiency;

then perhaps such corporations would be indistinguishable from state agencies. But how often is either condition met in relationships between government and private enterprise?

Government contracts I've bid on, on behalf of my employers, were extremely competitive. Private enterprise often incurs significant costs just in preparing bids, and takes risks in devoting their resources to such preparation. Not sure how many such risks the typical government agency faces, but I think not too many.

Have you prepared a bid for a government contract, Martin? Would you mind sharing that experience with us?

Politicians gave all sorts of justification for extending the duration as it grew over the centuries. The former entertainer turned politician, Sonny Bono, championed the last extension, arguing (circularly) it right and proper that proprietors of intellect property should bequeath the right to their heirs.

Instead of a duration of time, suppose the U.S. granted authors a limited sum of money for a work, so Rowling's copyright for a Harry Potter book expires when she has earned a million dollars in royalties say, or her entitlement to any royalty ceases when her total royalties reach a million dollars. Thereafter, she may continue selling her work however she pleases, but the state threatens to harm no one copying it. This standard denies Rowling nothing but statutory threats of harm to others, but it presumably decreases income inequality.

I don't understand why this reform would be "indecent". I don't know why threatening to harm children who copy books for friends without money, to arrange the delivery of more money to an adult who has already earned millions, is the standard of decency. I know this arrangement is now right, just, proper and noble. Must we now add "decent" to the list?

I suggest that if we cannot get children to learn more, perhaps we should try to get them to learn more practical and useful stuff.

I agree. I also identify the market with utility, i.e. "useful" knowledge definitively contributes to my satisfaction of your needs, not my own satisfaction but my satisfaction of your needs. Knowledge useful to you also contributes to your satisfaction of my needs. If we're concerned exclusively with our own needs, we obviously need no market, since markets are places of exchange.

Here's an alternative to state owned and operated schools and taxpayer financed vouchers.

As a child, you must attend a school. You and your parents select the school, and the school also meets statutory standards. The school must teach you standard knowledge and skills, established by statute. To be free of this obligation, you must demonstrate competency on standard tests or reach the age of liberation, say twenty-one.

Upon demonstrating this competency, your obligation to be educated is met, and you then owe the school a percentage of your income, say ten percent, for a period of time, say thirty years, beginning at the age of liberation. This right to your income is property of the school, and the school may sell it. The percentage is limited by statutory and common law.

If your income falls, the school may educate you further, to raise its revenue from you, or sell its right to another school better equipped to educate you. Although your obligation to be educated ends when you meet the standards or reach liberation, your potential value to educators ends much later and may never end. When your obligation to pay the education tax expires, you may extend it.

To be clear, you aren't obliged to work or earn income at all. You pay the tax only insofar as you do. I propose only compulsion that already exists.

Educational institutions in this system educate you to earn as much as you can and may even finance your further education. Both students and schools may be selective, but schools must accept certain students assigned by lot, so all students are accepted somewhere. Schools must accept otherwise unaccepted students in proportion to their size.

This requirement to educate all children and the minimal curricular standards are the price of enforcement of the property right, as well as some tax financing the armed men enforcing property rights of course. Let's be clear about that. The standard is minimal and excludes nothing. As long as schools teach the miminal standards, they may also teach you anything else.

In reality, our current system may tax the least educated most heavily by keeping them out of the workforce longer than is really useful to them. Some kids don't become highly skilled professionals, and they spend years in compulsory education that doesn't serve them well when they could be earning income. Furthermore, the most valuable skills often are learned only on the job, so formal education impedes this learning.

From your link:

Yet thousands of families took advantage of them. One result, according to Rouse's report: The schools that were losing students quickly changed their ways and generally improved on test scores – even though they had lost many of their top students to other schools.

The gains from schooling are mostly relative and short lived. We do not teach enough practical knowledge in schools. Our schools after the 2nd of 3rd grade are just a long test. They do not even pretend to teach much useful practical knowledge, they pretend to teach subjects that raise aptitude (it does not work), in the theory that they prepare the student to be better able to learn what they need to after they leave school.

Studies like discussed here:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/06/how_family_envi.html

If the only result from this study had been the "IQ is heritable," it would have been just another study. But its special methodology – studying adoptee's development from birth to adulthood – confirmed a shocking finding: As children grow up, the heritability of IQ rises, and the influence of family environment on IQ literally vanishes. Here are the custodial parent-child IQ correlations, by age, for adoptees and the biological control group:

We naturally think about the effects of family as cumulative: The longer you're in a family, the deeper the impression. At least for IQ, though, this "natural" thought turns out to be wrong. Family affects the very young, then fades out.

In hindsight, should this pattern really have been so surprising? Yes and no. Consider the parallel case of church attendance.

For a young child, family has near-absolute control over church attendance (unless you're Damien in The Omen, of course!): If your parents go, so do you; if they don't, you don't. As you get older, though, you gain some independence – and with it, a chance to show your true colors. By the time you're an adult, you only go to church if you want to. So it's not surprising that family matters less over time.

Even so, though, you would expect attending church to be at least somewhat habit-forming. Adults only go to church if they want to, but what they want has something to do with what they've experienced. The surprising thing about family influence on IQ is that the effect actually goes to zero. As you grow up, you find your own cognitive level, and the cognitive level you're looking for has nothing to do with the cognitive level you grew up with.

and others that study “head start” ect. show that the gains to schooling/early education are fleeting.

I suggest that if we cannot get children to learn more, perhaps we should try to get them to learn more practical and useful stuff.

joe.america. Worth watching.

More like a monopoly.

The state is precisely a monopoly of forcible propriety and the source of all other monopoly.

A corporation has to run efficiently to make profit.

Ideally …

If the state does some business exclusively with some "private corporation" and if this corporation does no other business, this corporation is indistinguishable from a state agency. Corporations come in many shapes and sizes, some nominally not for profit at all, and the extent to which they're truly organizations competing for profitable market exchange varies widely.

O.K. I'm finally reading the linked article. The quote (my emphasis) is from the third paragraph, not from the Heritage Foundation.

"But our finding that the bottom 90 percent did not enjoy real income gains equal to productivity growth implies that the growth rate of median income has lagged significantly behind growth in the mean."

That's the next sentence.

Dew-Becker/Gordon says that only INCLUDING proprietors income does the share of national income remain constant.

Right. Without proprietors, according to Dew-Becker and Gordon, "labour’s share has risen, not fallen."

Which is their basis for asserting that the median income hasn't kept up with production, which is the argument saying the top 10% are hording profits comes from.

No. They don't say that at all. Excluding proprietors, labor's share is not flat, because it rises. Their analysis is based on changes in the distribution within the "labor" category. It's not about "labor" vs. "proprietors". Proprietors are laborers, but the income reporting for proprietors is trickier because of accounting for inventories and other capital costs. These data suggest that proprietors (self-employed people) are doing worse than other laborers, not better.

Whereas, the Heritage study shows that, when using a common inflation calculation and total comensation (not just wages), labors share of national income remains constant WITHOUT including proprietors income.

The Heritage Foundation chart starts in 1970. The Dew-Becker/Gordon chart starts in 1950. The D-B/G chart is roughly flat between 1970 and 2005, so it doesn't vary substantially from the Heritage Foundation chart. The two charts don't seem to present exactly the same statistic, but both are roughly flat in the overlapping region.

It was the pay structure I was comparing to a union jobs, where wage is based not on performance but on the position itself.

Federal employees are basically members of a giant union aren't they …

They're members of a large corporation.

Plus, isn't it more difficult to fire someone from a federal job?

You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get fired from a Federal job …

Based on that, of course Federal Employees will rise faster…they're insulated from competition and market forces.

Is there a richer nation on earth which has absorbed proportionately as many immigrants from third world nations as has the U.S. over the past 30 years?

Not that I know of. There's not a richer nation of comparable size either. I'm neither a cheerleader for nor a detractor of the United States. I was born here, and I choose to continue living here. As nation-states go, the U.S. has many things to recommend it. Our 20th century flirtation with global imperialism isn't one of them, and our economy is increasingly corporatist and not nearly as free as our national mythology suggests. It's still freer than many European competitors, but that's not saying much.

I have no idea while nominal "libertarians" deny the impact of corporatism on distribution so zealously while the income of Federal employees rises so much faster than private sector income.

I agree that what we have tried has not worked. But haven't several experiments with vouchers shown that these lead to improved school experiences for at least some of the children living in low-performing areas? Further, the results from Florida showed that vouchers not only improved results for children who escaped from low performing schools, but also for those who didn't. The threat of losing students – and funding – motivated low performing schools to provide better education.

Florida voucher program yielded quick results

Of course the NEA fought the Florida vouchers, and got the courts to rule them unconstitutional.

The census provides their "experimental measures of CPS", using the Gini coefficient to measure income equality. Using their definition 14, which includes wealth transfers from government as well as other sources of compensation, the ratio has stayed pretty constant between '79 and '03:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/rdi5.html

We have been trying this for a long time. It appears to not work.

Anyway, while I'm not sure how both studies can show different results of the same data and both be accurate representations, the ultimate problem with the Dew-Becker/Gordon study is that, while it makes exceptions for movie stars and athletes compensation increases as having been due to "Skill-Biased Technical Change", it refuses to acknowledge that CEOs/managers rise in compensation can be accounted for due to changes in their job requiring more specialized skill sets, which would increased compensation. Rather it seems to arbitrarily attribute those changes to non-market forces, ignoring the growth in size and global market reach of modern large companies.

I mean, I'm sure the kid that invented facebook is in that top 10% as CEO, but the skill set he brought to the table was highly specialized, considering no one else had already created facebook.